The Canon Gardens

video guide transcript

[Shakespeare]: The Canon Garden consists of several little plots, each with plants from one particular play that I, Will Shakespeare, helped to write. As we speak of each play in the Canon Gardens, one of the gardeners stands beside me adding questions and observations about the play.

[Interlocutor]: Yes. What does it mean to call these the “Canon” Gardens?

[Shakespeare]: “Canon” is the scholar’s word for all my plays that you have now, gathered together.

[Interlocutor]: I see. These Canon Gardens, then, lie along the west wall of the courtyard. The gardeners have planted boxwood or, in some cases, lilies to separate each play from the next.

[Shakespeare]: There is one flower found in many of them despite of separations. Before we visit the Canon Gardens play by play, let me tell you about our marygold, which grows here and there in the Canon Gardens, just as it appears here and there throughout the plays. Our marygolds were not the same as yours. Both are of the same family as sunflowers. But most of the flowers you call marigolds are native to the Americas, and carry the formal name “Tagētēs”.

Our common marygolds have the name “Calendula”. “Calendula” means “little calendar” in Latin. In Latin the “calends” are the first day of every month, and in Italy this plant can bloom in every month of the year.

[Interlocutor]: Now that I look, yes, I have seen this flower before. Like many other plants, it first appeared in English gardens more than two thousand years ago, when the Romans came across the Channel and set themselves to rule Britannia, as they called England.

[Shakespeare]: In these Gardens, you see in particular the Calendula officinalis. If a plant’s name in the Latin includes the word “officinalis”, you may be sure that it played its part in the mysteries of the still room – the “officina”, as they named it in the monasteries. It was in the still room that we brewed and distilled many necessaries, especially medicines.

Marygolds were symbols of giving, too. The golden color comforts the heart and the spirit. But above all marygolds were a matter of daily food. We added marygold flowers to bread, syrups, preserves, possets, and drink. An apothecary or spice seller might keep an entire barrel filled with the dried petals, retailed by the penny or even the ha'penny or farthing, for many folk declared that no broth was well made without dried marygold.

[Interlocutor]: Let’s begin with the first garden at the south end of the Canon Gardens, nearest the Knot Garden. That one is the Macbeth garden.